Web conferencing has become an increasingly useful tool for conducting live meetings, presentations, training seminars, etc., over the Internet, or World Wide Web. In a typical Web conference, multiple participants in the conference are connected to each other over the Internet from their personal computers. An example software platform for providing Web conferencing capabilities is MICROSOFT COMMUNICATIONS SERVER produced by MICROSOFT Corporation of Redmond, Wash. Where a client desires to join an online meeting but does not have Office Communicator, for example, installed on the client computer, an AJAX-based (“Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”) Communicator Web Access (CWA) client is typically used to enable the client to join the meeting. While an AJAX-based CWA client is able to join the meeting, the client experience is constrained by the functionality available via Javascript.
To improve the meeting experience of a browser-based client without requiring explicit installation of a client application, a different type of client from the AJAX-based CWA client may be used. For example, a SILVERLIGHT-based client may be used as derived from the MICROSOFT SILVERLIGHT platform produced by MICROSOFT Corporation of Redmond, Wash. SILVERLIGHT enables the development of feature-rich applications that are nearly on par with native applications, both in terms of functionality as well as the underlying protocol used to communicate with the server. However, a SILVERLIGHT-type platform may still have some limitations in being able to develop such an application. For example, the browser-based client typically does not support a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket connection to the remote server(s) providing Web meeting conference capabilities. Such socket connections are not made possible based on the heightened security features inherent in the corporate networks of the client, in which policy file retrieval is prevented due to restricted ports and the overall inability to traverse firewalls. Indeed, restricted network connectivity exists in such situations as firewalled networks, networks behind proxy servers, etc. Without a policy file, the browser-based client rejects the opening of a socket connection to a remote server. Further, access to certain security packages such as NT LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication, Kerberos authentication protocol, or certificate authentication may not be available to the application. Without such authentication capabilities, the browser-based client cannot be admitted to a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server using the same protocol as a native client.
Although specific problems have been addressed in this Background, this disclosure is not intended in any way to be limited to solving those specific problems.